Lies My Mother Never Told Me (22 page)

I
N LATE
O
CTOBER
1998, I had lunch with my mother at Bobby Van's in Bridgehampton. This was the new, brightly lit, upscale Bobby Van's, not the old, dark tavern where my dad and his writer buddies used to drink. That place was now a fancy continental-style restaurant.

By this time, though she was only seventy, Gloria's memory was failing badly, but she managed to hide it well. The friends she still had must have only seen her at her best, when she pulled herself together to meet them for lunch, or dinner. When she was in public, she could still be amusing, even hilarious; and clearly, she was not cruel or biting to others the way she was to me.

I did not particularly feel like having lunch with her, but I steeled myself for the occasion. I put on my best face, and my lightest voice. As I ate my salad and my mother pushed hers around her plate, for some reason, she wanted to know what kind of credit card I used that I could draw money out of machines, so I took out my wallet to show her.

“That's a nice wallet,” she said. It was a black calfskin wallet that unfolded into three sections, one for cards, one for bills, and a change purse on the side.

“Thanks.”

“How much did it cost?” she wanted to know.

“About eighty-five dollars,” I said. I'd gotten it on sale.

“Eighty-five dollars! Are you out of your mind, spending that kind of money on a wallet?” She took out her own wallet, a beige cloth purse. “I got this at T.J. Maxx for ten dollars.”

I didn't respond; it seemed utterly pointless to argue. I suddenly felt unbearably uncomfortable. She waved to the waiter to bring her another glass of white wine. She'd had a Bloody Mary and a glass of wine already—for her, maintenance drinking. I asked for a refill on my coffee.

“No really, that's just ridiculous to blow money like that!”

She sipped her wine and I drank my coffee. Why, I thought, is it almost impossible for us to get through even an hour without a disagreement? When she made me angry, my whole body still went completely stiff, as if I were being embalmed. Now, at least, I was aware that it was anger—repressed and turned inward, so that it ate away at my insides like poison. I looked at my watch. I told her woodenly that I had to go, I had to teach my class. I started to push back my chair. She made a petulant face, puckering her lips. I didn't get up. I didn't like this face; it made me feel like a bad child.

What was I doing here? Did I even miss her anymore? I missed an idealized version of her. I missed the carefree, shining summer days of my late teens and early twenties, when her house and garden were filled with fragrant flowers and music and laughter and the clinking of ice in lovely glasses. We used to have so much fun, and everyone wanted to stay with us.

I did not like the person she had become. She said terrible things about her friends behind their backs. She, who had been a great liberal, now made horribly racist comments. She complained constantly about her health and refused all help. I realized now that she had become someone who, under normal circumstances, I would have run from as fast as I could. Was it possible to fall out of love with your own parents?

She asked the waiter for the bill. I offered to split it with her,
looking down as she made her tip calculations. The total was $84.52—the same as my wallet. Suddenly I started laughing. I expected a riposte, but she looked at me questioningly, her eyes vague. She hadn't caught the irony. Clearly, in her view, lunch was an opportunity for civilized drinking—a necessity that could not be avoided, while buying a marginally expensive wallet was not.

 

My mother had her first major bout of cirrhosis seven months later. Incontinent, unable to recognize her surroundings, she lay for several days on a urine-stained love seat in the TV room. Mary, the housekeeper, finally couldn't stand it anymore and phoned Michael Mosolino, who immediately called his brother Max, and then Jamie, who called me, and the four of us dropped everything and rushed out to Sagaponack. When we arrived en force, Mary was wandering around the kitchen in tears, wringing her hands.

Gloria did not even look human, lying there bloated and grunting like some kind of phocine beast. Jamie and Max lifted her to her feet and carried her, staggering and protesting, out to the car and to the Southampton Hospital Emergency Room. She tried to wave us off, furious that we were interfering, but she could not formulate a coherent phrase, could no longer walk on her own, and could barely control the movements of her arms or legs.

At the hospital, she kept repeating, “I've been kidnapped,” and told the nurses and doctors she wanted to go home.

They took ultrasounds of her liver; they ran blood tests; and they gave her psychological tests. Gloria was profoundly malnourished and dehydrated and had cirrhosis, and Korsakoff's syndrome—extreme memory loss and confusion caused by a deficiency of vitamin B to the brain—and alcoholic neuropathy in her arms and legs, a painful form of nerve damage.

And yet the young doctor who came out to meet us in the
waiting room said he could not keep her against her will. She refused to stay, and legally, they could not force her to do so. They wheeled her out, and she stared at us with abject fury, as if we'd committed some horrendous crime by bringing her here, which made us all feel guilty and ashamed and doubt our resolve.

I told the doctor, my voice tight with rage, “So what you're saying is that if she'd drunk arsenic, for example, then you could keep her, because that would constitute a danger to herself, but since it's only alcohol, it's not considered suicidal behavior? I swear, if she goes home and dies, I'm going to sue this hospital for everything it's worth.”

The young doctor stared at me blankly, as if to say he didn't make the rules. Then he said, “You'd need two separate psychiatric evaluations and a court order to have her committed against her will. That can't happen overnight, and meanwhile, we can't keep her.”

I find it absolutely astonishing that hospitals don't consider alcoholics in the advanced stages of the disease “a danger to themselves or others.” What could be more dangerous than this level of intoxication? The doctor prescribed Librium and sent us home.

The hospital was so concerned that Gloria was going to die, the same doctor called me at the house a few hours after her release with the number of an excellent private nursing service. I hired an R.N. named Linda, who came right over and stayed for six weeks. At night we hired nurses' aides to sit by my mother's bedside. We immediately put Eyrna's baby gate around Gloria's bed so she couldn't roll out. She couldn't stand up, much less walk to get booze for herself, although she certainly tried. Nurse Linda pumped her full of Librium, and we held vigil, day and night, waiting for her heart or her liver or her kidneys to give out.

We spent hours trying to get my mother to swallow vitamin B—enriched protein shakes, but her entire system had shut down,
and the neurological damage was such that for the first two weeks, she couldn't swallow without great concentrated effort. Her legs swelled to three times their normal size and turned brown.

After my brother and cousins went home, back to their lives and jobs, I stayed, along with Eyrna, who was nineteen months old and already walking and talking in full, cohesive sentences. Cecile, who in the summer lived half a mile down the street, stopped in three or four times a day.

People I hardly knew came by constantly and gave me unsolicited advice. One old friend of my mother's suggested we find Gloria a job, that this whole “episode” had been brought on by boredom. I called Gianna, who'd recently moved to Sag Harbor to raise her adopted daughter, Nina. They both came over at sunset, and Gianna ran interference for me while Nina entertained Eyrna. Everyone had a doctor who was better than my mother's doctor, whom they wanted to bring over. Finally, an old friend whose opinion I trusted told me about a Dr. Stephen Goldfarb, who had admitting privileges at Southampton Hospital.

Gianna and I sat in the kitchen, waiting for Dr. Goldfarb to arrive.

“She's in very, very bad shape. You understand she might not make it,” Gianna said quietly, her eyes serious.

“Yes,” I said.

Dr. Goldfarb walked in, carrying his old-fashioned black doctor's case. He had a sweet, round face, blond hair, and intelligent blue eyes. I took him upstairs to evaluate my mother. A while later, he and Nurse Linda came downstairs, looking none too optimistic. “It's hard to tell right now,” said Dr. Goldfarb. “It's touch and go. It'll depend entirely on how strong she is.”

“Oh, she's strong,” said Gianna. “Anyone else would have died a long time ago.”

He prescribed diuretics, and Wellbutrin, an antidepressant, which he explained would help with her anxiety and cravings.
“Most people who have an addiction to alcohol or drugs suffer from some form of depression,” he said. “So they self-medicate. Problem is, alcohol is a depressant, so ultimately, it just exacerbates the condition. It's a chicken-or-egg situation.”

Finally! A doctor who has a clue!
I had been convinced for years that my mother suffered from depression and anxiety, which she medicated with alcohol. I felt like throwing myself into his arms.

After three weeks of painful detoxing, my mother sat up in bed one morning and looked out at the world with the terrified eyes of a small child. She slowly, tentatively, pushed herself up to a sitting position and hoisted her fragile legs over the side of the bed.

“I'm going downstairs,” she said.

“Darling, that's not a good idea, you're still very weak,” Cecile pointed out.

“I'm going downstairs,” my mother said. The child was also willful and stubborn.

Thirty pounds lighter, she stood on her stick-thin legs and took a few shaky steps, stumbling, gripping the furniture and walls. Having emptied the house completely of alcohol, even the vanilla extract and rubbing alcohol, we helped her downstairs, and for a few hours she sat in the library/TV room, gazing at the furniture and books, as if she'd never seen them before. Her hands would get ahold of an object and endlessly pat it, rub it, worry it.

After a while I went in to check on her. She was sitting in one of the two high-backed Louis Treize red velvet chairs, her fingers circling the rounded grooves at the end of the carved armrests.

She looked up at me and said, “Hello, Mother,” her voice formal and alien.

“I'm not your mother, I'm Kaylie. I'm your daughter, Kaylie.”

“Why are you holding me prisoner, Mother?”

“This is your house, Mom,” I said, my voice trembling. “This is
your
house.”

“Yes, Mother. But what have you done to your house?” I'd never heard her speak as politely and distantly to anyone except the Dread Gertrude.

Eyrna came running in from her swim in the pool. “Gammy, Gammy!” she cried, and threw herself into my mother's legs. Gloria winced from the pain but ran a shaky hand over Eyrna's damp curls.

“And there's little Kaylie,” she said in a sweet, fragile voice, looking up at me. “She's a beautiful baby, isn't she, Mother? We all love her so much. She's a little high-strung, just like I was, but you'll learn to love her too, when you get to know her.”

I asked Dr. Goldfarb on his next visit if my mother's memory would return. He said he didn't know. It would depend on many factors, not the least of which was how strong her will was.

One of her friends, upon seeing the Wellbutrin by her bedside, told her it was an antidepressant. Gloria, horrified, had the friend throw out the bottle.

“You're trying to drug me!” she shouted at me when I came upstairs. “I'm not nuts, Mother, I don't need any crazy-people pills! And I don't like that doctor anyway. I want you to fire him, he doesn't know what he's talking about.”

Of course she wouldn't like Dr. Goldfarb; the man had spelled it out for her, clear as day. You drink, you die. Take this pill, it will help. But my mother would not even take an Advil because she was so terrified of drugs. For any ailment—menstrual cramps, upset stomach, flu, toothache—a shot of alcohol had always been the cure.

I considered mashing up the pills and putting them in her protein shakes, but what was I, the alcohol police? How long could that last? Must I give up my life and move in with her permanently to keep track of what she ate and drank and get her to take her pills, as if she were a recalcitrant child? Some people did that kind of thing, but I would not. Kevin called every day, wanting
me to come home. “Let someone else take the brunt of this,” he said. “Why does it have to be you?”

“Because there's no one else,” I told him, my voice hollow.

 

The same month my mother was teetering between life and death, the James Jones Literary Society symposium, planned a year in advance, was to be held at Southampton College, hosted by the MFA program of Long Island University. The speakers were Norman Mailer, William Styron, Budd Schulberg, Peter Matthiessen, Joseph Heller, and Betty Comden. There was no way to cancel now, and the day before the event on the last Saturday in June, the entire James Jones Literary Society descended upon us. I made a big pasta dinner and salad on Friday night, and invited everyone to my mother's house. I was on edge, uncertain still if she would survive, but my friends from the Society were kind and generous and asked nothing of me, and offered to help in any way they could.

The Society rented a small private plane to fly Norman Mailer and William Styron in from Cape Cod and Martha's Vineyard. I was amazed to find, when I arrived at the college, that the 250-seat Duke Auditorium in the college's brand-new Chancellor's Hall was completely packed, with people standing three deep in the back, leaning against the railings near the exit doors, and sitting on the steps leading down to the podium at the front of the sloping hall. Larry Heinemann, the National Book Award–winning Vietnam veteran, to my delight, had driven down from Boston to attend, with several other veteran writers, including the poet Bruce Weigl.